Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning
Zhiyang Xu, Chao Feng, Rulin Shao, Trevor Ashby, Ying Shen, Di Jin, Yu Cheng, Qifan Wang, Lifu Huang
Abstract
Despite vision-language models’ (VLMs) remarkable capabilities as versatile visual assistants, two substantial challenges persist within the existing VLM frameworks: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction tuning, and (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instruction tuning data. Both challenges lead to issues such as poor generalizability, hallucination, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we construct Vision-Flan, the most diverse publicly available visual instruction tuning dataset to date, comprising 187 diverse tasks and 1,664,261 instances sourced from academic datasets, and each task is accompanied by an expert-written instruction. In addition, we propose a two-stage instruction tuning framework, in which VLMs are firstly finetuned on Vision-Flan and further tuned on GPT-4 synthesized data. We find this two-stage tuning framework significantly outperforms the traditional single-stage visual instruction tuning framework and achieves the state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multi-modal evaluation benchmarks. Finally, we conduct in-depth analyses to understand visual instruction tuning and our findings reveal that: (1) GPT-4 synthesized data does not substantially enhance VLMs’ capabilities but rather modulates the model’s responses to human-preferred formats; (2) A minimal quantity (e.g., 1,000) of GPT-4 synthesized data can effectively align VLM responses with human-preference; (3) Visual instruction tuning mainly helps large-language models (LLMs) to understand visual features.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.findings-acl.905
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 15271–15342
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.905
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhiyang Xu, Chao Feng, Rulin Shao, Trevor Ashby, Ying Shen, Di Jin, Yu Cheng, Qifan Wang, and Lifu Huang. 2024. Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 15271–15342, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning (Xu et al., Findings 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.findings-acl.905.pdf